12. Jameson
Jameson
The cursor blinks at me from the laptop screen.
Page fifty-three. The scene where the guy realizes he's been coming home to a woman who's been leaving him in increments, packing emotional bags long before she packed the real ones, and he never noticed because he was too busy being someone else's idea of important.
I type two lines of dialogue and delete them. Type three more. Delete two.
The words come out wrong — too clean, too scripted, too much like the thing an actor would say in a movie about a marriage falling apart instead of what a man actually thinks when he's sitting alone in a motel room and his wife might as well be on another planet.
The laptop sits on the motel bed beside me, the screen casting a blue glow across the floral comforter. My toolbox leans against the door where I left it after fixing Pete's bathroom sink this morning. My shoulders are hunched, curled around the keyboard like I'm protecting something fragile.
Maybe I am.
This wasn't supposed to be therapy. Started as something to do with my hands besides fix pipes and stare at the ceiling and count the hours until I might catch a glimpse of Andy walking from her car to the studio.
But somewhere around page twenty, it turned into the most honest thing I've ever written because no one will ever read it.
The guy in the screenplay — call him James, because I'm not that creative — James keeps trying to explain himself to his wife, Sarah.
Keeps making speeches about how he wanted to give her everything, how he thought success was the same as love, how he got lost in other people's definitions of important.
But every time I write one of those speeches, I delete it.
Because that's not what matters. What matters is Sarah sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner alone.
Sarah leaving the hallway light on night after night for a man who doesn't deserve it.
Sarah getting smaller and quieter until she disappears completely, and James never noticing because he was too busy being a star.
I close the laptop and lean back against the headboard. The room smells like coffee and paint fumes from the touch-up work I did on Pete's lobby yesterday. My phone sits on the nightstand next to McKinnon's business card and the deed to the farm lot.
The house. That's the other thing keeping my hands busy.
Pete connected me with his stepbrother after he found out about the building purchase.
Word travels fast in Copper Falls — someone buys the old brick building downtown, the whole town knows about it before the ink dries on the papers.
McKinnon called it a miracle, said he'd been trying to sell that lot for two years but nobody wanted ten acres of farmland when they could build closer to town.
I walked the property with him on that same day. Rolling hills, a creek that runs year-round, enough space for a garden and maybe a dog.
The architect I hired from Sacramento says we can break ground next month.
Nothing fancy — a farmhouse with good bones, wide windows, rooms that flow into each other instead of feeling like separate worlds.
A kitchen where she can see the hills while she cooks.
A porch where she can drink her coffee and watch the sunrise.
Whether or not I'm in it.
That's the thing I haven't told anyone, not even Pete when he asks how long I'm planning to stay. If Andy doesn't want to see me again, I'll hand her the keys, sign over the deed, and drive back to LA to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with a life that doesn't include her.
The house isn't a strategy. It's not a chess move designed to win her back. It's a promise I made to a woman who believed in me when I had nothing to offer except dreams and a toolbox full of borrowed equipment.
I promised her a house with a porch and space to breathe. I'm building that promise even if the woman I made it to never wants me inside it.
My phone rings, cutting through the quiet. Phil's name on the screen.
I stare at it for three rings before answering.
Andy's father hasn't called me once since I've been here.
Hell, he barely looked at me during that disaster of a conversation in their living room three weeks ago.
Stood behind Andy's chair like a wall, arms crossed, making it clear exactly where his loyalties fell.
As they should.
"Phil."
"Jameson." His voice is steady, measured. "You free tonight?"
"Yeah."
"Meet me at Murphy's in an hour."
The line goes dead before I can ask questions. Murphy's — the bar on Main Street with the neon Budweiser sign. Never been there. Seemed like the kind of place where everyone would know exactly who I was and why I was in town.
I guess that's about to change.
* * *
The drive takes five minutes, but I sit in the parking lot for another five, trying to figure out what Phil wants.
He's been civil since my speech but not warm.
Protective of his daughter in the quiet way good fathers are — not aggressive, not confrontational, just immovable when it comes to the people he loves.
Now he's asking to get a beer.
Murphy's is exactly what it looks like from the outside — dim lighting, scratched wooden floors, the kind of bar where the stools have permanent dents from years of the same people sitting in the same spots. The bartender nods at me when I walk in, but he doesn't seem surprised to see me.
Phil's already at the bar, a half-empty beer in front of him.
I slide onto the stool beside him. "Thanks for calling."
He orders me a beer without asking what I want. Budweiser, same as his. We sit in the quiet for a full minute, which should be uncomfortable but isn't, because Phil is a man who earned his silences the way other people earn their words — by filling them with thought instead of noise.
The TV above the bar shows a baseball game neither of us is watching.
The bartender wipes glasses and pretends he's not listening to whatever conversation he thinks is about to happen.
A couple plays pool in the corner, their voices mixing with the crack of balls and the soft rock coming from the speakers.
"I've been thinking," I say finally, because Phil called me here and I owe him honesty. "About what I did. What I didn't do. The three years I spent chasing something I thought mattered more than the woman who made it all possible."
Phil takes a drink, doesn't look at me. "Go on."
"She used to leave me notes. I stopped reading them. Just grabbed my keys and left and figured I'd see her when I got home."
My beer arrives. I take a long pull and taste nothing.
"She'd fall asleep on the couch waiting for me.
I'd carry her to bed and tell myself that was enough, that was me being a good husband.
But I never asked about her day. Never noticed when she stopped talking about the things she wanted to do or the places she wanted to go.
Never saw that she was disappearing right in front of me. "
Phil's fingers drum once against his beer bottle. "What else?"
"Vinny — my manager — he used to give her lists.
Rules for public appearances. How to dress, how to smile, what not to say.
I let him do that. Told myself it was temporary, just until the career stabilized.
But three years isn't temporary. Three years is choosing who matters and who doesn't, over and over again, until the choice becomes who you are. "
The words taste like ash, but I keep going because Phil is listening and maybe this is the only chance I get to say them out loud.
"I forgot our anniversary. Not because I'm forgetful, but because work became my priority. I took her for granted so completely I stopped seeing her at all."
Phil sets down his beer and looks at me for the first time since I sat down. His eyes are steady, measuring.
"I've been married for thirty years," he says. "Do you want to know the secret?"
I nod because Phil is going to tell me regardless, and because I need to know how two people stay together when everything in the world is designed to pull them apart.
"Spend time with your wife. Talk to your wife. Be mindful of her moods and her feelings."
He says it like it's the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it is. Maybe I've been looking for a complicated answer to a simple problem — how to love someone well enough that they know it, feel it, never have to doubt it.
"That's it?"
"That's it." Phil takes another drink. "Us men, we're careless. We say things and do things and it doesn't register with us. And it's those small things that feel like a thousand papercuts."
A thousand papercuts. Not one catastrophic wound — a thousand small ones.
Every dinner I missed. Every time I let Selena redirect my evening.
Every night I came home to find Andy already asleep, already gone, already one step further away from the man who was supposed to protect her from exactly this kind of hurt.
"The buildings, the house I'm planning to build — that's not what you're talking about."
"Buildings are fine. Houses are fine. But that's not marriage.
" Phil's voice is quiet, matter-of-fact.
"Marriage is asking how her day was and listening to the answer.
Marriage is noticing when she's quiet and caring enough to find out why.
Marriage is showing up for the small things because the small things are the only things that matter. "
The bartender walks past, refilling our napkin dispenser. The pool game in the corner ends with someone winning and someone else racking up for another round. Normal Friday night sounds in a normal bar where normal people talk about normal problems.
Nothing about this feels normal to me. Nothing has felt normal since I saw Andy's face at the studio on my last day of shooting, watching me with eyes that used to light up when I walked into a room.
"I'm not helping you with Andy," Phil says, direct now, looking at me square. "But I'm saying, you better know what kind of life you want by now."
The question hangs between us. What kind of life do I want?
Not the question Vinny would ask — what kind of career do I want, what kind of image, what kind of legacy.
The real question, the only question that matters when you're sitting in a bar with your father-in-law and your marriage is bleeding out.
"I do." I put down my beer, look at Phil's profile against the neon beer signs. "I want her in it."
The words come out steady, certain. Not performed for Phil or for the bartender who's definitely listening or for anyone else. Just the truth said to a beer glass and a man who loves Andy as much as I do, in his own quiet way.
"I can let go of the fame. The money. All of it." I pause, take a breath that tastes like certainty. "But not Andy. I love her too much."
Phil doesn't respond right away. Takes a drink, looks at the TV where someone just hit a home run and the crowd is going wild. Then he nods once, a movement so small I almost miss it.
"Good."
One word. That's all Phil gives me, and it's enough.
He showed up, said his piece, heard what he needed to hear.
The rest is on me — the daily work of loving someone well, the small things that add up to a life worth sharing, the choice to show up and keep showing up until showing up becomes who you are instead of what you do.
We finish our beers in comfortable silence.
Phil leaves first, claps me once on the shoulder as he passes.
No speeches, no advice about winning his daughter back, no promises that everything will work out.
Just a father who made sure the man who loves his daughter understands what love actually costs.
I sit at the bar for another ten minutes, turning Phil's words over in my mind. A thousand papercuts. The small things. Spending time, talking, being mindful.
The simplest things in the world, and somehow I forgot how to do all of them.
The bartender wipes down the bar around me, patient in the way bartenders learn to be with customers who need a few more minutes to figure out their lives.
Outside, Copper Falls settles into Friday night quiet — porch lights coming on, families gathering around dinner tables, couples who remembered how to talk to each other sharing the kind of evening I used to take for granted.
I know what kind of life I want. I know who I want in it.
The rest is just work.